"Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice."

Now if they would just give Java to the Apache Foundation, life would be great. Of course, that will never happen. But at least they did the right thing with OpenOffice. Kind of saw this one coming. Oracle has no interest at all in an office suite.

It is true that it was hard to figure out exactly what Sun was up to in their later years. They went on a massive buying spree of buying up smaller companies, including ones that couldn't possibly benefit them financially, such as StarOffice. The bought up Cobalt Server appliances, tried to sell their server appliances for a little while, and then just discontinued them. They bought up Virtual Box, which was another one of those "why?" moments. Virtual Box is useful for desktop virtualization, but it's not exactly enterprise level server virtualization type stuff.

Sun ended up going massively into debt by going on this buying spree, and the companies it was buying simply didn't seem to provide a lot of benefit to Sun's overall business strategy.

Libreoffice and Openoffice both can operate as services providing document conversion. This is a feature of value to Oracle. Now its not worth fighting with the community and ending up poorer quality document conversion in other products Oracle sells.

So yes their is a reason for Oracle to remain interested. The OpenOffice program does allow Oracle to provide customers with better products.

First, they gained a permanent seat on the JCP (Java Community Process Board), which gives them more infuence over the future of Java. And Oracle's entire enterprise application stack is built on Java.

Second, they gained the Solaris operating system, which has long been the "gold standard" for running high transaction / high availability Oracle databases.

Third, they gained control of Sun's hardware business.

What they hope to do with all this is simple. They want to become a full solution provider for all your data needs. They will probably build "database appliances" with zero maintenance and such. Just shove your data into it, pull it back out, and you are good to go.

It seems pretty cool that OpenOffice will now gain developers from Apache and from IBM.

Now ... if libreoffice really wants to merge the codebase, they could just relicense their stuff under a dual LGPL3 and/or Apache license, so the best of both projects can still be merged or at least so that both projects will remain compatible at a source level for a while.

After all, it was libreoffice who forked so it should be them who merge back.

Add to that there is a lot of dead wood lying around everywhere. the code in OpenOffice will be picked upon for LibreOffice. LibreOffice will be the fork of choice until some other fork comes along and Libre becomes dead wood.

"Two communities developing two almost exactly identical pieces of software instead of just one; makes both communities weaker and makes progress slower.

That's usual in GNU/Linux/FOSS world.

How many widget toolkits are there? How many desktop environments? How many distros? How many pieces of software that do the same thing? People like for sure reinventing the wheel. "

That's not a valid comparison: there is only toolkit with the Qt API and toolkit with the GTK+ API. There's OpenMotif and there is/was lesstif but that was not a fork.

There some different office packages already but, while there are some specific variants of OpenOffice, the only real fork is Libreoffice. This will cause a lot of repeated efforts until the projects diverge (which is admittedly not that bad). The *real* downside, of course, is that 100 people were laid off by Oracle after libreoffice forked.

The license may become an interesting difference though. I would see why IBM is more interested in keeping the code under a non-copyleft license, and others may follow.

All in all, I like the forking idea: there was no advantage in giving the code to libreoffice since they already have it with the license they want and they are not asking for code attribution so there was nothing to gain by giving the code to libreoffice.

"Two communities developing two almost exactly identical pieces of software instead of just one; makes both communities weaker and makes progress slower.

That's usual in GNU/Linux/FOSS world.

How many widget toolkits are there? How many desktop environments? How many distros? How many pieces of software that do the same thing? People like for sure reinventing the wheel. "

That's oversimplifying. Forks happen for a reason or they die. If that reason is gone then a fork is pointless. This is different from competing projects that do not share a direct lineage to each other. Often those projects have different goals in the first place, although they generally overlap in some places.

It seems pretty cool that OpenOffice will now gain developers from Apache and from IBM. Now ... if libreoffice really wants to merge the codebase, they could just relicense their stuff under a dual LGPL3 and/or Apache license, so the best of both projects can still be merged or at least so that both projects will remain compatible at a source level for a while. After all, it was libreoffice who forked so it should be them who merge back.

The Apache 2.0 license is a liberal non-copyleft license. AFAIK this means that both open source code and closed source code can be contributed to an Apache 2.0 license project.

LibreOffice is licensed under LGPL v3. This copyleft license means that no closed-source components can be accepted.

So from now, open source code contributed to ASF OpenOffice can be adopted (and re-licensed as LGPL v3) by LibreOffice, and LGPL v3 code contibuted to LibreOffice can be incorporated into ASF OpenOffice (but it must remain LGPL v3, and copyright attribution must remain with the original authors).

I don't think the corporates (Oracle and IBM) want the latter to occur. I think they want the ability to make all or prat of ASF OpenOffice closed source. I'm pretty sure they don't want any LGPL v3 copyleft code where the copyrights belong to individuals.

Therefore, IMO, no re-merge is likely to be accepted by the ASF OpenOffice crowd.

ASF policy is not to incorporate LGPLv3 source as LGPLv3 isn't AL 2.0 compatible ( http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html ). The same holds for closed source code; it would need to be under a compatible (ie: liberal) license.

Note that the copyrights belong to individuals on Apache projects too. Any issues for users (the 'corporates') are likely to be around the LGPLv3 licensing; both the copyleft issues and the patent terms.

They could have given OOo to LibreOffice instead of Apache; we think they did this just to be mean to the LibreOffice group.

We still have no response as to what is going to happen to the OOo developers. IBM has announced that they will provide developers for the Apache migration. We think IBM is most likely stepping in to further the Symphony project (currently it's based on the OOo 1.x code base).

It is already becoming too hard to move patches between the OOo code base and the LibO code base; they are becoming too far apart (last week's merge of the two code bases broke LibO master and it's just now getting somewhat stable). The current plan seams to be to monitor the OOo project and only cherry-pick items of interest.

So far none of the LibreOffice developers has expressed any interest in joining the Apache team.

The above is mostly my impressions of the current state and I don't speak for the LibreOffice community.